Cotton-tipped swabs find advantageous application in numerous situations in both home and hospital environment. In this respect, in many instances it is desirable to have a swab readily available in an easily obtainable manner. To this end, the present invention provides a manually operable dispenser for dispensing individually cotton-tipped swabs in an upright position, which dispenser may be operated by merely pushing downward on a portion thereof. U.S. Pat. No. 3,306,494 to Castner discloses a device for dispensing an individual cotton-tipped swab horizontally. The swabs are individually spaced along a resilient carded strip, which strip is indexed to a dispensing position from which an individual cotton-tipped swab is dispensed. The device requires that the swabs be positioned along the resilient strip with a predetermined spacing therebetween. As will be appreciated, aligning the swabs in such a manner is a tedious and time consuming endeavor. In addition, the necessity to repeatedly index the carded strip requires a relatively accurate mechanical arrangement within the dispenser. Together these arrangements, i.e. to accurately space the swabs and to index same, create a relatively costly and complicated device.
The present invention, however, overcomes these problems and provides a cotton-tipped swab dispenser which is much simplier to operate, and which does not require an indexing arrangement or exact positioning of the swabs. In this respect, the present invention provides a dispenser wherein a plurality of swabs may be placed in random arrangement therein, and wherein swabs are dispensed individually by merely pushing downward on a portion of the dispenser. Still further, a dispenser according to the present invention has relatively few parts, which parts are easy to fabricate.